Obama’s Irrelevance

He was speaking of Saddam Hussein’s invasion, occupation and annexation of the emirate of Kuwait as his “19th province.”

Seven months later, the Iraqi army was fleeing up the “Highway of Death” back into a country devastated by five weeks of U.S. bombing.

When Bush spoke, the world sat up and listened.

Consider the change.

“It’s time for Gadhafi to go,” said President Barack Obama two weeks ago. “So, let me just be very unambiguous about this. Col. Gadhafi needs to step down from power and leave.” And did he go?

Receiving Obama’s ultimatum, Gadhafi rallied his troops and took the offensive. His army is now 100 miles from Benghazi.

Obama urged the king of Bahrain not to crush the peaceful protest in Pearl Square and to accommodate the legitimate demands of its Shiite majority.

The Saudis, seeing a threat to their oil-rich and Shiite-populated eastern province should the Bahraini monarchy fall, sent 2,000 troops across the King Fahd Causeway. Bahrain then brutally swept the “outlaws” from the streets of its capital, Manama.

Among the few things that may be said with certainty about the Arab revolution of 2011 is that it has revealed the rising irrelevance of President Obama in that part of the world.

With impunity, Benjamin Netanyahu defied his demand that Israel cease to build on the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority, despite Obama’s pleas, then went ahead with a U.N. resolution condemning Israel.

Caught flat-footed by the uprising in Tunisia, the White House could only offer belated congratulations to the demonstrators who had deposed and driven out our longtime ally, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

After Tunisia, Vice President Joe Biden insisted the embattled Hosni Mubarak was not a dictator in Egypt. Obama sided with Mubarak and then said he ought to go. Then, when the Saudis and Israelis protested that we were abandoning a friend of 30 years, Obama concluded Mubarak should stay.

When the army suddenly sent Mubarak packing, the White House hailed the revolution as the harbinger of an Arab spring.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton burbled that her 15-minute stroll through Tahrir Square was “a great reminder of the power of the human spirit and universal desire for freedom and human rights and democracy.”

Some of the young demonstrators, recalling America’s 30-year friendship with Mubarak and ambivalence over his ouster, refused to talk with her.

In denouncing Syria and Iran for crushing peaceful protests, the Obamaites acted consistent with the democratic values they preach. In their muffled response to the brutal treatment of demonstrators in Bahrain and Yemen, they put national interests above national ideals.

Indeed, it is this clash between our professed ideals and our perceived interests that has produced the reigning confusion in Washington and the near paralysis of American policy in the Middle East.

“Nations have no permanent friends or allies; they only have permanent interests,” said Lord Palmerston. America lacks that kind of certitude. She is conflicted. She cannot make up her mind. Do our interests come first or our ideals? How can they be in conflict?

From World War I to the Carter era, U.S. national interests drove U.S. foreign policy. In Wilson’s war “to make the world safe for democracy,” we partnered with five empires. In World War II, we allied with Stalin. In the Cold War, we accepted the friendship of autocrats and dictators and caudillos and generalissimos who shared our fear and loathing of communism.

When John Foster Dulles was the face of U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s, the neutralism of nations such as Nehru’s India and Sukarno’s Indonesia was seen as immoral.

But with the end of the Cold War, moral clarity vanished.

We are now divided over whether kings, dictators and autocrats who share our interests but regard democracy as lunacy or a luxury they cannot afford can be America’s allies and friends.

There is a second cause of conflict roiling the American mind.

Even as Moscow was abandoning communist ideology and China was giving up her dream of world revolution, the United States was converting to an ideology of global democracy. At some point in the past 20 years, it became the historic mission of America to make the whole world democratic.

And should we fail in this mission, George W. Bush reminded us, the end of American freedom would be ensured.

So, having defeated — or rather outlasted — our enemies with a pragmatic policy of accepting the friendship of any and all who would stand with us in that great Cold War struggle, we set out to remake the world in our own image, even as Moscow and Beijing had sought to do.

As they failed, so will we.

As for Obama, with our foremost Asian ally going through the agony of its worst natural disaster and with revolution raging through the Arab world, he has given us his picks for the Final Four in the “March Madness” of college basketball — and set off with Michelle to party in Rio.

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17 Responses to Obama’s Irrelevance

Pat hits it out of the park again! May this also serve as an antidote to those who see the US entering a “third war” in Libya, like the leftists in the 80s who were so convinced El Salvador would be the next Vietnam.

Buchanan is as selective as ever in his perception.
How relevant could the US still have been, had they not, led by con artists like Rumsfeld & Cheney, wandered off into the deserts and mountains of the Middle East and Central Asia on a ghost chaste on false premises. Time wasted and money wasted, subsequently morally defunct. That is the lot of the US, post Bush. That is where the US was made irrelevant.

Dubya, Cheney and Rumsfeld led the US astray; ideologues like Buchanan will always make themselves blind to even the simplest of facts, and of course to their own follies.

You launch into an attack on the Obama Administration for not following the Bush Senior line on Iraq (doing nothing while the invasion of Kuwait was takling place, taking time to build a consensus at the UN in order to get a Resolution passed, not moving until a coalition of regional allies was 100% behind the use of force) when that’s exactly what Obama has done?

The Cold-War policy of supporting many of the Middle Eastern dictators now being challenged by a population that wants democracy represented a ‘moral clarity’ that America now lacks?

Democracy can’t be exported, but you namecheck America’s ‘foremost Asian ally’? An ally that only – has – a democratic system because America imposed one on it?

“Among the few things that may be said with certainty about the Arab revolution of 2011 is that it has revealed the rising irrelevance of President Obama in that part of the world.”

I don’t think that’s fair. Obama could be relevant, easily. He could have piled in big-time supporting Mubarek. And he could have piled in big-time in Tunisia, and could pile in big-time in Bahrain. And he is piling in it seems to some extent in Libya.

Instead he’s made the *choice* not to “be relevant,” and I for one think that’s smart. Indeed, I’d like to see the U.S. choose to be irrelevant as regards the Israeli/Palestinian issue too.

Trying to whack Obama for not making us “relevant” seems to me to just be opportunistic.

If anything, what’s gone on in the ME has shown just shown increasingly the price we pay for being “relevant.”

Be careful what you wish for, Pat, you want the U.S. President to be all “relevant,” well, that was Mr. Bush the II. Relevant as hell. And stupid as hell too, and still delivering unto us the costs of same.

Pat, I am very surprised that you didn’t note that Obama’s decision to back intervention in Libya was merely the latest step in the inevitable process of globalization. Why, Obama, the gifted Constitutional scholar, has simply outsourced Article I, Section VII (11) of the U.S. Constitution (“The Congress shall have the power. . .to declare war . . . .”) to those parties who can perform the function in a more cost efficient manner: the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council. After all, who is in a better position to judge whether the U.S. should intervene in the affairs of a Muslim country, specifically an Arab Muslim country, than other Arab Muslim countries who are familiar with the language and the social structures of their fellow Arab Muslim country Libya. Moreover, since they employ their own unique version of “one man, one vote,” they are in a much better position to make this important decision with considerably fewer man-hours (indeed, they can do it in man-minutes) than our own cumbersome 100 member Senate and 435 member House of Representatives. The call on this one is not even close. Just think Henry Ford.

I would think that the author of “A Republic, not an Empire” would consider this a good thing.

Perhaps there was an excuse to support petty by comparison evil during the cold war, but that ended two decades ago. What was left was our schizophrenia – or perhaps bipolar – between the ideals and our “friends”, the latter being our co-dependents for our empire addiction.

Our problem is not the inconsistency of how we project influence, but that we are trying to influence – or to use the less polite word, meddle – instead of staying home and being an example.

I think few things show this better than the Administration’s response to Bradley Manning, and that is a citizen here in the USA.

This must really annoy Buchanan, Obama getting this one so completely right. Saying some nice things and then going off to watch b-ball and hang with his wife is… exactly what St. Ronald would have done. Plus, the US will risk no ground troops, the Arab League and the EU are in the military lead, and war in North Africa with air superiority is one of those rare easy wins that happen long every half-dozen wars or so. If this works out right, which may not be that big an if, it’s great work by Obama playing it out so privately and with so much international diplomacy. Imagine, if you will, if you could, if the air forces involved were all piloted by swine… Palin, Romney, Bachmann, etc. pulling something like this off. Must be damned annoying in a partisan sense.

” Plus, the US will risk no ground troops, the Arab League and the EU are in the military lead, and war in North Africa with air superiority is one of those rare easy wins that happen long every half-dozen wars or so.”

Gee, that sounds like some nice stuff you have been smoking, Mr. Panfile. According to today’s NY Times:

” The United States has at least 11 warships stationed near Tripoli, including three submarines — the Scranton, the Florida and the Providence — and the destroyers the Stout and the Barry. All five fired cruise missiles on Saturday, the Navy said. Other coalition ships in the Mediterranean included 11 from Italy and one each from Britain, Canada and France.”

” The United States, France and Britain had insisted that at least some Arab governments be involved in the Libyan operation, at least symbolically, to remove the chance that Colonel Qaddafi would portray the military action as another Western colonial intervention in pursuit of oil. But there was no sign that any Arab military would explicitly take part.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/world/africa/20libya.html?pagewanted=2&sq=Allies open air assault&st=cse&scp=1

The only leadership England and France and the Arabs are providing consists of giving directions to the U.S. to declare war on Libya, thus relieving the U.S. Congress of its weighty responsibility under the U.S. Constitution to declare war.

BTW have you considered the membership of the Arab League and the Gulf Cooperation Council, which voted to authorize this act of war against Libya? The Arab League consists of the following 22 countries:

Apart from Kuwait, that great democracy we went to war on behalf of in 1991, can you identify any democracies among those listed countries? You must be really proud that President Obama, that great exponent of democratic values around the world, chose to entrust the important decision of taking the U.S. to war to that motley collection of failed states and assorted despotisms rather than entrusting our totally unreliable U.S. Congress, elected by the citizens of the U.S. It’s understandable that President Obama has such trust in Moslem countries since his own father, who was a Moslem, abandoned him and his mother when he was two years old.

Care to send me some of that stuff you’ve been smoking? It sounds like it’s really good.

It’s not a question of Obama being irrelevant, its a question whether the U.S. itself is irrelevant when it comes to foreign policy in the region. It doesn’t matter who the President it, events have taken their own course going all the back to the Iraqi insurgency and there’s nothing a President can do about it. We should accept this situation and come home.

Hugh McGuinness asked: “If US sovereignty is @ risk can you identify the nation that has eclipsed that sovereignty?”

I wasn’t thinking about a country so much as transnational forces. These forces do not take the form of a Nation-State.

In fact, they are hostile to all Nation-States.

Globalists and international bankers have no country.

But if you press me, I’d say China seems to be calling a lot of shots through their surrogates in this country.

Let’s see NAFTA where secret tribunals decide trade disputes, not the American People through their elected represenitives, WTO settles disputes the same way: In secret. International bankers acting through the Federal Reserve, the Dollar seriously threatened and talk from Trea. Sec. Guitner of an “international reserve currency.

Setting up of a North American Security Perimeter.

No control of our border with drugs and illegal aliens flooding in.

If you don’t seriously think there are threats to American Sovereignty, then you haven’t been paying attention.

Hugh McGuinness asked: “If US sovereignty is @ risk can you identify the nation that has eclipsed that sovereignty?”

One more item. President Obama goes to a transnational body, the U. N., to get “authorization” for offensive war against Libya, instead of to the American Peoples’ representitives, the Congress, as required by the Constitution.

Hugh, you can’t get any more loss of soverignty than that.

A transnation body’s authorization is more important than the American People’s representitives…????